


Summer

by Tierfal



Series: The Inside of Emptiness [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Demisexuality, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 04:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5078347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People mean well, mostly, but he's alone in this – right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer

**Author's Note:**

> ………so! Um. This is a sequel to Void – you can read it on its own if you want, but that probably contextualizes it better! And all of the warnings/tags/please-tell-me-if-I'm-out-of-line stuff from that fic apply here as well. More of this segment later this week if I can get myself not to hate it; and then there will be at least one additional part… someday. I am bad at deadlines. I am bad at a lot of things.
> 
> Also: I am sincerely sorry I didn't reply to all of the comments and/or messages about the prior fic – I hope everyone who left one knows they are welcome to drop me a line anytime, anywhere; I'm really crap at responding when I get busy or overwhelmed (which is all the time), but I always, always care, and I am always happy to listen if you need somebody to talk to. ♥
> 
> Please take note that this and the remaining stories in this 'verse are all set a long while after the previous one – three or four years post-Brotherhood, probably?  It's an AU as far as the Brotherhood ending is concerned, in more ways than just the basic premise: I also couldn't bear to take alchemy away from Ed when he was already feeling like this. Although I did leave him still stuck with the automail arm, because I'm an asshole.
> 
> One last thing: when I'm writing demi!Ed in any capacity (this was really pronounced on [le blog](http://alloysandozone.tumblr.com) too if you follow that), there's this sort of interim period in my head where he really sort of starts to destroy himself while no one is watching, and it changes his character pretty substantially. So he might seem kind of OOC, I guess?, but it's the result of the extrapolations I made behind the scenes. Or, more accurately, it's a largely unintentional side effect of those extrapolations, because he just throws this shit at me, and I write it down and shake my head a lot. >____> Anyway, if he seems a little less… _Ed_ , you're not alone in noticing that. And everyone and their mom is going to talk about it over the course of the next several thousand words. ~~Please don't leave me nasty comments about him being out of character and me ruining the franchise, is what I'm saying, because I am legitimately too emotionally fragile for that shit right now~~ what who said that
> 
> …it also occurs to me that I should probably warn for a touch of vulgarity in the early dialogue in this part. And some very dark Ed's-internal-monologue thoughts. Stay safe, frands. ♥

* * *

 

 _how I long for the autumn—_  
_sun keeps burning me_  
_every stone in this city_  
_keeps reminding me_

 _can you protect me_  
_from what I want?_  
_the love I let in,_  
_it left me so lost_

 _Mother_  
_make me_  
_make me a big, tall tree_  
_so I can_  
_shed my leaves and let it blow through me_  
_Mother_  
_make me_  
_make me a big, gray cloud_  
_so I can rain on you things I can’t say out loud_

— “Mother” — Florence + the Machine —

 

* * *

 

Ed has hated summer for as long as he can…

Well.  No.  He’s hated summer since the automail.

Before that, it was a damned _relief_ —no schoolwork mucking up his head; no mess of facts and figures and details he was supposed to memorize and regurgitate, crawling into the crevices between the sigils and the lines that he wanted to be keeping in his brain.  No struggle to relate to children who talked about their fathers, who went home and played with toys, who fought their way syllable by syllable through books with more words than pictures.  No enforced deference to grownups who ranted at him for falling asleep after a night of learning things that _mattered_ , like that was some kind of fucking _crime_.

With Teacher, the summer hardly mattered; the whole year was a blurry stretch of sparring and sweat and cramped text and diagrams and practice and practice and _practice_ regardless of the weather—though he remembers thinking it was unholily hot; remembers instructions to drink more water than he ever would have imagined necessary if he hadn’t already been thinking… If he hadn’t already known…

_Water—thirty-five liters; carbon—twenty kilograms—_

But the automail was when predictions of summer heat changed from a minor inconvenience to a premonition of excruciating pain.

The whole fucking dumbass “wool uniform _with_ undershirt in all seasons, on all occasions, no exceptions, only _doom_ ” directive is not fucking helping matters, either.

Winry always says “Just keep it covered, you moron; I’ll—work on it,” and bites her lip when she sees the places that the metal’s burnt his skin.  He knows she means it—honestly, it’s gotta be worse for the people in Rush Valley than it is for him here, so he’s glad they’re her priority, more or less.  He’s also secretly glad that those guys’ll be her guinea pig, so to speak.  He knows that he’ll be one of the first to benefit if she figures out something awesome and finds a way to implement it; and he knows that _that’s_ just a matter of time.

Al doesn’t say anything.  Al just looks at him, mouth clamped shut, lips pressed in a thin line, eyes shadowed and narrowed and sad, and Ed knows that guilt so fucking intimately that he can feel the edge of it against his throat.  He knows that no matter how many times he says _I don’t care, it’s all right, it’s fine, it’s really nothing, look at what we got for what I paid, everything is_ fine _, Al_ , nothing in the universe will dull that blade.  They were both supposed to get back to the way they were before—back to their bodies, back to rights.  Al didn’t want it just to be him—Al’s too damn _good_ to be able to forget what Ed lost that night, no matter how much time passes with him here, and whole, and _living_ the way humans are meant to, with fingertips and nerves and eyes and eardrums and tastebuds galore.

Al just looks, and says nothing, and refuses to forget.

And Ed loves him for that so much that it hurts more than the heat ever will.  It’s thick and heavy in the center of his chest, but _fucking_ hell, it’s beautiful.

Anyway.

Summer.

Automail.

Uniforms.

Fucking _atmospheres_ of hot air pouring out of Havoc’s mouth across the table as the clock hand drags towards five.

“I don’t even want to tell you about the sex,” he says, dreamily, which is about the most obvious lie Ed has heard in his life since that time when Al was four and _covered_ in frosting and cake crumbs and kept repeating _Wasn’t me_.  “Not because it’s not amazing, ’cause it is, but—just—it’s so _special_.  It’s like it’s—sacred or something.  I don’t want to talk about it, ’cause then it won’t be all just _ours_ anymore.  You know?”

“As always,” Breda says, rolling his pen slowly across the desktop, monitoring its progress intently as he nudges it along, “you’re doing an exemplary job of not talking.”

“Thanks,” Havoc says.  “It’s just—I get it now.  It’s past words, is the thing.  Love is.  _God_.  I think I’m gonna marry her.”

“And relinquish your membership to the Pathetic Bachelors Club?” Breda asks.  “Damn it, Jean; you’re our _poster boy_.  You can’t quit.”

“Get bent,” Havoc says contentedly.

“You were less annoying when you were in love with the Car,” Breda says.

The Car is something of a myth: up until he started dating Rebecca, Havoc talked about nothing except the antique (his word of choice was “classic”) roadster he’s been laboriously fixing up despite a pronounced lack of practical knowledge about the whole process.  Ed has never figured out whether or not the Car actually exists—as far as he can tell, no one’s ever _seen_ it, and Havoc has always brushed off all of Ed’s suggestions of calling Winry for some professional advice.  It’s perfectly possible the Car is complete bullshit, and Havoc just wanted a manly hobby to talk about at length to demonstrate his coolness; but Havoc has never seemed to Ed like the type to _invent_ something like that.  Ed’s settled on the likelihood that the Car does, in fact, reside in the driveway and garage of Havoc’s little townhouse, but that he’s exaggerating hugely about the progress he’s made on it, because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

“On the upside,” Breda says, turning the pen precisely one-hundred and eighty degrees and starting to roll it back towards himself, “if you can convince a chick as bangin’ as Rebecca to put up with your crap for more than a week at a stretch, there must be hope for the rest of us.”

Ed would honestly like to know what the denotation of _bangin’_ is.  What differentiates _bangin’_ from ordinary _hot_?  Is it functionally a synonym of _foxy_ , or is it more connotative of physical attributes alone, whereas _foxy_ is predicated on a specific attitude?

Somebody needs to write this shit down.  The data’s all anecdotal, and Ed sucks at linguistics.

He also sucks at focusing on a huge-ass pile of fucking requisition forms when the heat is seeping into the meat of his brain and cooking it from the inside _while_ his dumbass coworkers ascend to all-new heights of objectifying women and shit.

He taps the eraser of his pencil slowly on the next yawning, gaping, endless blank line.  What the fuck is he supposed to write there, again?  Fucking… shit.  Even the pencil looks like it’s sweating.  Maybe that’s his sweat.  From his hand.  Running down the pencil.  That’s _disgusting_.  Hopefully it’s actually sweat in his eyelashes distorting his fucking vision, which is also disgusting, but not quite as bad.

…gross.  Sweat in his _eyelashes_.  That’d explain the faint burning sensation in his eyes.  Fucking saline everywhere.  This is a travesty.  They should just shut the whole fucking building down and ship everybody to the snow when it gets this fucking hot; no one’s going to get _any_ work done like this.

“Aren’t you shacking up with Sheska now?” Breda says, rotating his pen in Fuery’s direction.

At a glance, it’s hard to tell if Fuery blushes, or it’s just a sunburn setting in.  “That’s—we’re not—there’s no _shacking_.  In any direction.”

“What a curious idiom,” Falman says.  He looks the least drained and pale and sweaty and heat-deadened of any of them: he isn’t slouching or outright lolling or lying directly in the path of the struggling metal fan and drooling about Rebecca Catalina.  His hair is kind of drooping, though.  “If anything, it should refer to cohabitation alone, rather than being a euphemism for coitu—”

“Okay,” Breda says.  “Jean’s out.  Kain’s accounted for.  Vato, all you need is some girl who’s a walking encyclopedia.  Or a walking book of questions, since you’ve got all the answers.”

“Hmm,” Falman says.

It feels like Ed’s breath turns to steam before he drags it back up his throat; he swears he can almost hear the steel of his shoulder creaking as it expands; it’s a constant prickle-burn on the edges of his unscarred skin.  His blood is sort of squidge-crawling through his veins; he can feel his heartbeat throbbing slowly in his swollen-ass fingertips, in his sweaty fucking palms, right up until—

“Ed, though,” Breda says.

And his heart starts to race, and his thoughts start to stick, and his guts start to churn.

Don’t.  Just leave it; just don’t.

Breda’s looking at him— _watching_ him, like he’s a fucking _sideshow_ —and rolling the pen back and forth.  “Ed’s harder.”

Havoc snickers.  “Bet he is.”

“Shut up,” Breda says to Havoc, still looking at Ed—immovable, unrelenting.  “’Cause the problem is, there aren’t too many girls your age who’d _get_ you.  Who’d get the whole, y’know… lifelong-quest-and-unending-sacrifice thing.  Are there?  Hell, not too many people at all.”

All the ambient shifting and throat-clearing and paper-shuffling just—stops.  Everything except the furious _blatblatblat_ of Ed’s pulse in his fucking head and the rhythmic creak of the suffering fan goes _still_.

And the door to Mustang’s little corner office is wide fucking open to try to coax some of the miserable dead air back and forth, and—

And Ed wants to—go.  To crawl in a hole and maybe stop existing for a while.  Just, like, a day or two.  And only if it’s cool in there.  If it’s not, he’ll go—wherever.  Anywhere.  Anywhere in the fucking world but here.

“But I think you kinda know that,” Breda says, picking up the pen and setting it on its end, eyes fixing on him, and Ed can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t _think_ through the humming in his skull and the leaden shroud of the impenetrable heat.  “I think it factors into your weird… insecurity thing.  The whole ‘Well, yes, I’m a genius, obviously, but I’ve got all this guilt and all this automail, so other than my intellect, I think I’m worthless, and no one’s ever gonna care.’”

The fan rattles.

Ed’s heart beats in his temples, in his knuckles, in the slick of sweat at the back of his knee and in his toes—which are curling instinctively, down in the sauna contained inside his fucking boot.

“Which is a cop-out,” Breda says.  “The fact that letting people in is tough is what makes it worth doing; usually you know that better than anybody.  But with this, you get all hung up on your inexperience and crap like you’re the only one on the planet who hasn’t had the time to figure out dating, and that’s shameful or whatever—but it’s not.  If it was complicated, _Jean_ couldn’t do it.  I think you’re just overanalyzing the whole thing and getting caught up in the emotional part when it’s really _way_ simpler than that, and it’d click for you if you could just relax.”

Breda sits back in his chair, taking the pen with him; he folds his arms and then points the tip of the pen right at the center of Ed’s forehead, like he’s solved every last equation in the universe.

“I think,” he says, matter-of-fucking-factly, “that we just need to get you laid.”

There has to be a way out of this.

There has to be some kind of an escape route, some kind of a back door he can kick through and flee from, some kind of a—

Some—

Just—

It’s too fucking hot to fish a coherent sentence out of the cesspool of his thoughts, let alone a fucking comeback, let alone a snarl or a dismissal or a rebuttal or _anything_ that’d shut Breda up and dim that light of triumph in his eyes like he just reached into the core of Ed’s fucking body and tore out the truth of him—

And he _almost_ —

—did.

But—

Ed likes girls.  He likes the way some of them wave their hands when they talk; he likes the way some of them outline their eyes and shit, and it exaggerates their expressions when they get all excited.  He loves the way Winry screeches like a fucking barn owl when she sees a new tool she wants—once his ears stop ringing, anyway.  He likes Paninya, and Sheska, and Rosé, and Lieutenant Ross; he _really_ likes Major Hawkeye.  He likes Rebecca, too, which is part of what makes it so fucking uncomfortable when Havoc talks about her all the time, because it feels like gossiping behind her back even though he’s practically reciting long-ass odes to every feature that she’s got.

But he doesn’t want any of them to—like— _touch_ —him, or… anything.  He doesn’t find a girl’s mouth as interesting as what it says.  He doesn’t find their hands as interesting as what they _do_ —Winry has cracked, smudged fingernails underscored with grease because she’s fucking brilliant with those hands; because she _rebuilds lives_ with them.  That’s fucking beautiful, but it isn’t—like—‘hot’.  It just… is.  It’s a fact.  She is a human being with a remarkable skill, same as him, same as anyone.

Her eyes are a really pretty color of blue—not even like a bright summer-sky-blue; it’s darker than that; it’s that first moment when the horizon starts melting into purple as the sun goes down.  It’s a deep water blue.  Like sapphires.  Like shadows on the snow.

Al asked him, once, the other week, in a casual voice, over breakfast, before he’d had much coffee, probably hoping he wouldn’t remember afterward—“Do you ever dream about Winry, Brother?”

He said, “Yeah, sure, sometimes.  Do you?”

He didn’t say _I dreamed the other night that she was making us a new Mom out of automail, and I kept saying she should stop, and she kept saying ‘I’m trying to help,’ and right when she finished, its eyes lit up red, and it said ‘Ed-ward’ just like Nina did right at the end, and I couldn’t stop screaming—_

 _But when I woke up, I couldn’t breathe to scream, and I couldn’t move to turn the fucking light on, and I guess it was stupid, but I thought it would be_ over _when we got you back—I thought we would set that one thing right again, and all the rest would fall back into place._

_And that was stupid, wasn’t it?_

He knows that what Al was really asking was “Do you ever dream about _having sex_ with Winry, Brother?”, and the answer to that is that just thinking about her that way makes him sick to his stomach, because it feels like a betrayal—of her; of how great she is; of the simple fact that she’s a human being who _has_ a body, but it’s so much less than who she _is_ ; of the less-simple fact that so many people probably take one look at her and do all kinds of fucked-up shit to her inside their heads _because_ she looks like that, because she’s pretty and all curvy and whatever shit—

And the whole things stirs up this fucking whirlpool in the pit of his stomach, and his guts twist tighter and tighter and tighter and _tighter_ until he thinks he’s going to cough them up in one big mass of blood and dreck and viscera, and that’ll be the end of it—the end of him.

He doesn’t want to get _laid_.

And he damn fucking sure doesn’t want his fucking _coworkers_ to try to make it happen to him.

For him.

Whatthefuckever.

“I think you need to get a fucking life,” he says.

Too far.  He can see it instantly—Breda’s eyes widen a little and then narrow.  The guy was only trying to be nice; he was just offering to do Ed a solid, as far as he’s concerned, and who the fuck is this condescending asshole kid to respond to that with—?

“Are you scared?” Breda says.  “Seriously, it’s not that big a deal.  And it doesn’t have to be a disrespectful thing if you’re upfront about it, and everybody knows what’s going on.  You find a chick who’s cool with that, and you get your dick wet—”

No.  _No_ , fuck, mayday, _stop_ this shit—

“—and it’s great, and it’s over before you know it, and then you’re a man.”

Because you can’t be, without it—isn’t that right?  You can’t be a person.  You can’t be _whole_.  Isn’t that what it comes down to?  If you don’t dream about pretty girls naked, you’re some kind of fucking _alien_ , and nobody wants anything to do with your shit.

Just the mere abstract fucking _thought_ of the slide of flesh makes Ed’s stomach drop so hard and so fast that his eyes unfocus, and his banging heart leaps up and stops his throat.

Ha.  _Bangin’_.  Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to mean.  Maybe people are supposed to have that effect on you—make your organs jump around in your chest cavity and block your airways and shudder there.  Maybe that’s what it’s about.

He hates it.  It hurts.

“That’s _enough_ ,” Hawkeye says in the bullwhip-voice, and it cuts straight through the thick heat of this horrible fucking room.  “All of you are dismissed.”

Ed’s eyes are responding to his efforts to move them—nothing else is, but eyes are a start.  He darts them towards the clock above the file cabinets; it’s four minutes to five.  Maybe the heat’ll break when the sun goes down, in another… what?  Two hours?  Three?  Maybe he can go home and lie in a cold bath and pretend he’s dead.

The intrusiveness of that thought startles him awake.

He keeps—thinking—that kind of shit.  Lately.  Since… pretty much just since he stopped _moving_.  Since he got Al back, and he didn’t have to drive himself so doggedly that there wasn’t time to think anymore.  Since he started to find just enough hours left over after work to qualify as _spare_ , more or less.  Since he started to have the leeway to sit and really observe all of the people around him; since he started to feel Al drifting off towards all those Normal Life things Ed would’ve died in a second all along to give him.

Since fulfilling his life’s entire goal left him feeling grateful and relieved and completely fucking empty.

Since he noticed that even the people he loves the most don’t really understand him anymore.

It’s not that they don’t make _sense_ —they do; it does; it’s all perfectly fucking logical, especially from an evolutionary point of view.

It’s just that he’s on the other side of a fucking chasm from them, and it’s way too far to jump, and what if falling’s worse than being left behind?

Don’t think about it.  Just—don’t.  Better if—better just not to.  At all.  Slam the door, flip the deadbolt, draw the blinds.

But right now—for once, or at least for the first time in a _long_ -ass while—he’s not moving fast enough.  In the two full seconds he spends rooted to the chair, everybody else scrambles to grab up their belongings and makes a fucking break for the door.  That says a thing or two about the power of the word ‘dismissed’ jackknifing off the right tongue, but holy _hell_ , two seconds _flat_ , and then it’s just—

Him.

And Hawkeye.

And…

He has to shift forward in the seat to put his feet on the ground—which is just _bad fucking design_ , all right, not, y’know, anything _else_ —in order to get the leverage to scoot his chair back, and that kills another three-quarters of a second, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Mustang’s silhouette sauntering through the doorway and pulling out another of the chairs.

He could just shove all the sheets of paper into a mound and then run.  But they’re from different files, and he’d just be fucking over his tomorrow-self, and it’s not like—

Well, shit.  It’s not like he can’t handle Mustang; what the hell is there to be afraid of?

’Cause he knows, somehow, at a deep level, with a feeling like a tightening right underneath his sternum, that Hawkeye wasn’t mad at _him_.

So it’s just—Mustang.

And Mustang ain’t shit.

Still, there’s—a faint touch, just a flutter of something like… what?  Trepidation?

Because Mustang just _gets_ people.  Mustang reads people like most people read newspaper headlines—quick and fucking easy, skimming for the relevant information, and if he’s interested, he’ll look further, or else he can chuck them aside.

Ed honestly doesn’t know how much the bastard’s figured out.  He’s not a fucking moron—or at least not about shit that involves sticking his stupid nose into the private lives of his employees—so he must know something’s… wrong.  Fucked-up.  Weird.  About Ed.  Something extra-fucking-special; something in _this_ arena, the whole sex-love-romance-dating hellhole-thing.  He must have noticed the… what?  The way Ed avoids those kinds of questions like they’re a fucking contagion?  The way he tenses every time the stupid banter starts?  The way he never, ever, _ever_ brags about his plans on any given Friday night?

He’s tried.  He’s tried to keep it under wraps, or at least out of the fucking spotlight; he’s hedged and dodged and outright fucking lied to try to hide it.  But Mustang’s not stupid, and they’ve been snarking at each other since Ed was a _kid_ , and…

And shit.  _Shit_.  Mustang sits down and crosses his legs at the knee before Ed can convince his own fucking asshole joints to hold his weight and help him stand.

So they’re just—sitting.  The two of them.  And Hawkeye’s standing.  And it’s silent.  Which is—fine.

Mustang reaches out—it’s getting really, really fucking hard to tell how much of the slowness of things is the heat, and people actually feeling all lazy and shit; and how much is Ed’s brain rocketing through thoughts like a fucking freight train going downhill with no goddamn brakes—and picks up one of the files someone abandoned in the mad rush for freedom.

“If it makes you uncomfortable,” Mustang says, gaze panning down the page, “I can tell them to stop.”

He doesn’t mean _tell_.

He means _order_.

He means _I can use my position of power to alter the overall personality of this team if it would help your panicked little animal brain rest easier_.

It’s—a nice—thought.

It really is.

But it’s not that simple.

Ed tries to clear his throat.  There’s too much fucking heat in it—too much humid air; he can’t tell what’s saliva and what’s sweat.

“They’d wanna know why,” he says.  “They’d—I mean, they’d do it, I guess.  Probably.  They’d be… cool about it.  But they’d wanna know why.  So it’s—it’d be—easier to—not.”

Mustang’s gaze lifts to glance at him, and he looks away.  Safer to admire the fucking file cabinets.  He never noticed before that the labels don’t match at all.  Must’ve been handwritten by half a dozen different employees or something.  Makes sense.  You can’t just—expect the same person to be available whenever a cabinet needs to get labeled, and Mustang didn’t even have this room until a couple years ago, although it’s practically fucking impossible to imagine someone else prowling around a space that he’s claimed so damn entirely that the very fucking walls just about breathe out his na—

In his peripheral vision, a Hawkeye-shaped shadow steps forward and pulls out the chair right across from him.

Fucking trapped.  He should’ve known better.  He should’ve _run_.

He should’ve—

“Edward,” Hawkeye says, and maybe it’s the military training, maybe it’s the manners his mother taught him, but his eyes snap to her whether he likes it or not; “have you ever experienced sexual attraction?”

The fan creaks, but the air’s not moving.  Nothing is, except his feeble fucking heart slamming itself against his ribcage, twirling up his throat.

How can she—?

So fucking _clinical_ , just like that—fucking scientific, _out loud_ , like it’s just—

Like it’s not even a secret; like—

The back of his neck burns; his face, his throat, the skin all down his chest—all of it, fucking aflame with the heat and the horror and the disbelief, and she just— _said that_.  Like it doesn’t even matter; like she wasn’t cutting to the fucking heart of him and dragging it out on display with the hot blood gushing on her fucking hands, like—

Like it’s just a normal fucking question.  Like she’s waiting for an answer.  Like she expects one.  Like he owes her that much, after all the times she’s had his back; like he owes her the fucking truth.

He does.  When you think about it.  When you think about equivalency.

He swallows, and it sticks—his mouth feels dry; his whole head feels arid, hollow, echoey, strafed with ribbons of the ever-unfurling _heat_.

“I—dunno,” he says.  Like spitting fucking nails—fucking knives.  Shards and broken pieces—pottery that spent the whole day baking in the evil fucking sun.  “I don’t—think—so.”  He can feel Mustang’s eyes on him like a pair of fucking pistol barrels.  Without them, would it be a damn relief?  Hawkeye’s face isn’t giving him much to go on, but it’s kind of—soft.  For her, anyway.  Her gaze on him.  No fucking judgment in it; he’d know; he’d feel it.  “I mean, I never… but you can’t prove a fucking negative.”

“You don’t have to,” she says.  “You don’t have to prove anything.”

She and Roy exchange glances, and then—

It’s weird.  It’s weird and uncanny; Ed can tell on a fundamental level—by instinct—that they’ve stopped being two officers, ceased to be commander and subordinate, and resumed a connection that stays suspended when they are.

They’re just two people now—two people who go a long way back, and have a lot in common, and understand each other without words.

“There’s a name for us,” Hawkeye says.  “It’s ‘asexual’.”  Mustang shifts, and Hawkeye’s mouth quirks.  “Or,” she says, “if you find someday that there are circumstances under which you _might_ feel that—there are other words.  It’s a spectrum.  Like light.”

“Or a scale,” Mustang says, with the biggest cheesy grin Ed’s ever seen on another human being, and— “Like pH.”

And what the fuck?  Is he—he’s trying to be _nice_.  He’s trying to be cutesy and funny and diffuse the tension, because…

Because he wants Ed to feel better.

That has to be it.

There isn’t any other explanation that makes the variables add up; he must—

Just—

 _Care_.

Ed’s head spins so hard he might as well be drunk off his ass right now.  It’s too much all at once; too much information to process, doled out in half a dozen fucking sentences in sequence, and he doesn’t know where to start analyzing it and breaking it down into pieces he can understand.

Hawkeye—

Is like _him_ , maybe even more like _this_ than he is; there are _other people_ who—

And Roy Mustang actually _gives a shit_ —

And—

They know.  Both of them, they know; they know about _him_ , they know what’s in him, what’s _lacking_ in him, and they don’t… mind.  They get it, or at least Hawkeye does, and Mustang’s trying to.

They don’t think he’s a huge fucking freak with nothing but pieces missing—nothing but shit that’s not there; nothing but a conglomeration of the edges of the holes.  Nothing but fucking emptinesses stitched together, with a little steel on the side.

They don’t think there’s something wrong with him.

And—

How could there be?  How could this be wrong if _Hawkeye’s_ like this, too?  Hawkeye’s pretty much the coolest, smartest, most shit-together-having person he’s ever met; if _she’s_ —if she doesn’t—

He looks at her.  And then he looks at Mustang.  And then he looks at her again, and the words all stick and jumble in his throat until the letters and the syllables are meaningless, and it’s all just gibberish clogging up his airway, and he drops his gaze to the tabletop, but he wishes he could tell her—

Everything.  The depths of the loneliness and the heights of the fear and the dizzying ricochets between them; the faint but unshakable sense that he’s slowly but surely being left behind by everyone he’s ever loved.

And that’s the even more amazing thing.

If she’s like this, too, then she probably _already knows_.

A thin layer of sweat fucking trembles on the back of his neck—like a coating, like somebody slathered it there, magma dripping slowly down his spine.  He stares at his hands—fucked-up, mismatched, eternally wrong, like the rest of him.  Ill-fitting.  Only ever halfway to human.

The particular rustle of limp, damp, heavy fabric tells him Mustang’s shifted just slightly.

“It was a bit inconvenient,” he says, and his tone is—what?  Light?  Pleasant?  Conversational?  Like he’s trying to tug all the right wires to defuse the tension mingled with the stifling fucking heat in this room; like he’s trying to make Ed feel… safe.  Comfortable.  At-home.

He of all people ought to understand the fundamental problem with the last one.  You don’t _get_ to come home when you burned it down and gave it up; you don’t _get_ to close the door somewhere and let the weight of the world slide off your shoulders for a while.  You don’t get a _place_ when you fuck your first one up that bad.

And lately Ed doesn’t have the people anymore.

“I believe I missed out on quite a lot of dates around that time,” Mustang is saying in Hawkeye’s direction, “because everyone assumed that you and I were romantically involved simply because we spent so much time together.”

“My heart bleeds for your sacrifices,” Hawkeye says, so drily the weather should be taking notes.

Roy laughs—softly, gently, and it doesn’t even _sound_ like him; there’s no venom or acid or ulterior-motive-bastardliness in it anywhere.  He’s just—a guy.  Just a man.  Just a human being who happens to have a uniform on today, just a _person_ , with a big maelstrom of turmoils and triumphs underneath the skin.

Ed is—

—safe here.

For the first time in a long time, he is sitting in a room with two people who _get it_ and _don’t mind_ —

It’s fucking dizzying.  Like falling off a fucking cliff and feeling the wind dragging through his hair, hauling on his clothes, scuffing at his skin, but he hasn’t hit the ground yet, and what if it’s not as bad as—?

He swallows hard—once, twice, three times, willing enough of the precious little moisture in the room to collect in his mouth so he can speak.

Part of him doesn’t want to break the spell.  Part of him doesn’t want to remind Mustang that he’s still Major Elric, still the token smartass kid, still the naïve little mascot whether or not he’s barging through the streets in a red coat like a knight’s escutcheon, brighter than a bloodstain.  What if this whole nice-thing is just another of the endless fronts, and it cracks through and shatters and slips away?  What if Mustang’s just waiting for Ed to let his guard down, and that’s when the knives’ll come out?  What if it’s just a long game to make him even more vulnerable before the cruel shit—?

But he wouldn’t.

Not really.  Not Mustang.  He’s an asshole, but he’s not… _bad_.

And even if he was, he wouldn’t dare pull that kind of shit in front of _Hawkeye_.

She’s the one who moves her hand on the table, like maybe she’d reach out to touch Ed’s arm if it wasn’t so fucking hot.  “Are you all right, Edward?”

“Yeah,” he says, which is a fucking lie, and probably they all know it.  “Just—”

They wait.  Both of them.  For him to figure out what he wants to say.  Like they care, like they _want_ to know, like they respect him, and—

Part of him sort of knew they did—for his competence, and his intellect, and his power.

But it’s a different thing to be sitting here with his ribcage pried right open, bleeding out his secrets.  It’s a different thing for them to respect the _worst_ part of him, the broken shit, the big fat fucking mess that’s underneath.

It’s different for them to still care when he’s not good at _this_ shit at all.

And he owes it to them, for that, to dredge up something halfway coherent, doesn’t he?

“I didn’t—” He tries to clear his throat.  “I didn’t know there were enough of—”  _Us_.  “—enough people like—”  _Me_.  “—that—for there to be a… whole… category, I guess.”

He risks a glance up at Hawkeye’s face, and she smiles at him, kind of gently.

“I didn’t either for a long time,” she says.  “I was fortunate enough to have people around me who didn’t try to change me either way.”

His heart beats quick and hard in his temples, one-two-one-two, and he can feel the sweat snaking through his hair—damp-hot trails on his scalp, and everything is horrible when it’s this hot, but if he doesn’t ask the real questions now, he might never get the chance.

Edward Elric doesn’t back down from a challenge, right?

He’s famous for this.

He’s also famous for being under Mustang’s eyes and thumb and patronage, and right now he can feel that the first is true.

He holds his head up even though it’s fucking heavy with the heat and the sweat and the swimming, churning, densely-tangled revelations.  “Did you ever—fake it?”

Hawkeye pauses—she does that a lot, actually, he’s noticed; it’s her way of regrouping before she responds, and figuring out how to arrange her thoughts in the most efficient way before she articulates them.  Sometimes, depending on the situation, he also suspects she might be counting down from ten trying to suppress the urge to beat one of her coworkers around the head with a blunt object, but in any case it’s one of the innumerable tiny things that make her pretty great.

This pause is long, though, which must mean she really has to think it over.

Shit.

She must sense that he regrets even fucking asking, too, because she offers him another little smile.

“I wouldn’t say that I ‘faked’ it,” she says.  “I trusted the validity of my feelings too much to lie to myself or anyone else.  But I did… try.  To act ‘normal’ in a controlled situation, to see if that might… awaken something.”  She sits back in her chair slightly; she’s still confidently upright—all sharp, clean lines—but the military posture has relaxed into something a hell of a lot friendlier, and it’s staggering, what a fucking difference that makes, even here, in the same damn office with the same damn people and the same damn shit to hide.  “I suppose testing it that way is sort of expected in a household where science is the only religion you’ve ever learned.”  She arches an eyebrow at him.  “I imagine you know a thing or two about that.”

Ed tries to smile.  It’s better than _I fucking tried, Major, I fucking tried_ so hard _to make myself feel anything but sick and fucked up and past hope and past help, and this is the first time in five years that I haven’t thought I was the only one there_ is _who’s ever been this way._

Mustang heaves one of his best histrionic sighs, which startles Ed into glancing at him, not least because he’s breathing a ton of hot air out into the room, as usual.  He’s got one elbow on the table to rest his chin on his fist, and his expression is half ruefulness and half stoic resolve, and he looks like an idiot and an oil painting and a guy you might have the sudden impulse just to talk to if you saw him hanging around the bar.  Like he knows a couple things, at least, and he’d make you laugh while he invented a couple more.

“It was a tremendous blow to my teenaged dignity,” Mustang says, and he can’tmean— “Not to be able to convince someone to be interested in me, but once I struggled past the injury enough to recognize that it had never been about _me_ , I think we were both better for it.  And I know that we were closer than we would have been if it had somehow worked.”

“Well,” Hawkeye says, “‘closer’ in a manner of speaking.”

Mustang actually—

— _snorts_.

Like a fucking _nerd_.

Better yet, like a nickering friggin’ _horse_.

Then he half-turns to look at her, and it’s—

More than just amused, more than just fond or affectionate or whatever shit.

He looks at her like she’s the most important person in the fucking world at this instant, regardless of what she does or doesn’t feel.

A spear like lightning edged with ice—hot-cold sudden comprehension, shredding his stomach lining, jagged edges carving through his flesh, ramming right into the base of his spine so that his whole body startles hard.

That’s what he wants.

He wants to matter.

And maybe it’s the most pathetic thing in the entire fucking universe, but he wants to matter _to_ somebody, and he wants to know it, because they look at him like _that_.

It’s fucking greedy, too—selfish and way past stupid.  Because he matters to Al and Win, obviously, and Al especially gives him a look a hell of a lot like that sometimes.

But they’re family.  They’re blood.  They’re stuck with him, and maybe they’re okay with that, but they didn’t choose him.  They didn’t pluck him out of the endless swirl of human souls wriggling through the world and say _This one’s special—this one’s mine_.

He shouldn’t care.  It’s so fucking dumb; he’s no stranger to getting a grand total of zero of the things he wants for his own self, and that’s fine.  Wanting and needing are two different categories, and one you take care of, and one you push aside most of the time.  That’s fine.  Whatever.  He’s used to it.

It’s just that the world is so fucking big and so fucking _hollow_ , and some part of him is positive that if someone looked at him like that, it’d feel a little smaller and a little fuller and a little more safe.

It’s fine.

He can take care of himself; he always has.

“The point is,” Hawkeye says, jarring him out of the plume of steam clouding around his writhing thoughts, “everything that you feel—or don’t, or can’t feel—is completely valid.”

“And scientifically viable,” Mustang says, shifting in his chair again.  He switches which leg he’s got slung over the opposite knee and then looking like he regrets the concentration of body heat.

Hawkeye smiles slightly.  “As I mentioned—there’s nothing to prove.  There’s nothing you _have_ to prove.  There are no criteria, and there is no checklist, and there is nothing missing from you.  You are who you are, precisely how you are, and that’s enough for anyone who matters.”

“People struggle to understand it,” Mustang says, disassembling his histrionic chin-on-hand slump long enough to gesture towards the larger table and its empty chairs.  “I did, for a while.  But… Edward.”

Mustang never calls him that.

And it’s funny how the laser eyes are always, _always_ too-intense, but just this once they’re not too warm.

“I know that ordinarily your principle of existence is ‘do what needs to be done and fuck anybody who disagrees’,” Mustang says, which… sounds about right, actually.

Except that he’s not done.

“But I also know that when you believe that you’ve done something wrong,” Mustang says, “or that you’re not trying hard enough, or in one manner or another that the insufficiency is something that comes from within you—that’s when you get merciless, and you start to punish yourself.  And it’s extraordinary, in a way, because you never treat anyone else like that.  You are the only person you can’t forgive.”

He sits up, and forward, and fixes the laser eyes on Ed’s, and holy _shit_ , they’re like molten obsidian and a sea of ink, and Ed could drown and die in there, but some part of him is sure the well would feel like silk on every centimeter of his skin.

“Please,” Mustang says.  “Please remember that this is not your fault—not anyone’s fault; there isno ‘fault’, because there’s nothing wrong with you.”

Ed’s never seen him like this—never seen him this earnest about anything; never seen the way the planes of his face look when he’s overflowing with good intentions; never seen _this_ kind of fire in him, pouring off of him in waves so warm it’d be stifling even if the air around them wasn’t dragging with the heat.

His brain won’t take in any of it—just won’t.  The wheels are spinning, but the boiling sun warped all the gears, and the belts just turn and turn, and nothing moves, and nothing catches, and he can’t bring himself to comprehend the concept that Roy Mustang—

—likes—

—him.

As a human being.

Roy Mustang thinks he’s valuable, more or less; for his own sake, not just because of alchemy and intellect and all the reasons that he’s useful.  But as a person.  Apparently.

Roy Mustang thinks he’s a valuable person and wants him to be happy.

How the hell is he supposed to process that?

It’s all he can do to try to choke down the knot of disbelief and bewildered gratitude that’s clogging up his throat for long enough to say something— _anything_ ; he’s been staring like a fucking bug-eyed amphibian for about a year already.

“Okay,” he gets out.

Mustang has the grace to look faintly chagrined, although the touch of pink in his cheeks could very well be the miserable fucking heat instead of embarrassment over hurling something like that in Ed’s face out of the fucking blue.

“Good,” Hawkeye says, calm as you please, and that actually kind of confirms it, in a way, because she only ever rescues Mustang when he needs it, so she must’ve sensed sheepishness on him, too.  She reads him easier than anyone.  Ed’s gotten better at it over the years, but she pretty much wrote the user’s manual, and as far as he’s concerned, what she says goes.  “Edward,” she says, and his attention snaps back to her like it’s magnetized, and she’s got the whole world charged with leylines to her fingertips.  “I’d like you to take this.”  With the characteristic machine-like efficiency, she selects a sheet of paper from her clipboard, smoothes it out, catches up an abandoned pen, and writes.  “It’s my telephone number at home.  Memorize it instead if you’d prefer, but if there is ever a time you need something—including something such as a reassurance of doubt—I want you to call me.”

She folds the paper twice, neat and clean and fastidious as ever, and holds it out to him.

“Any time, day or night,” she says.  She tilts her head towards Mustang.  “He already does.”

“Guilty,” Mustang says.

Hawkeye smiles again.  “We’re on your side.”

Ed’s arms feel heavy; his sleeves feel sodden; his brain feels unhooked, unhinged, and unstable in the extreme.  But he reaches up and takes it, even though it feels like he must be putting sweat-mark fingerprints all over it—even though he ruins everything he touches, and he’d be shocked if this was an exception.

Mustang pushes his chair back and stands.  “Let me go bring the car around; it’d be criminal to make either of you walk home in this heat, and I don’t have time for the court-martial.”

Ed grasps around in the tornado inside him for a normal reaction.  “Anything to avoid paperwork, huh?”

Mustang flashes him the brightest devil-may-care grin.  “Precisely.”

He saunters out the picture of the debonair young general, but the way he shuts the door really quietly belies that more than he probably thinks.

Hawkeye looks at Ed.

Ed looks back.  He can do that much; he has to do that much.

“Did you have any questions?” Hawkeye asks.

She doesn’t bother to add _that you didn’t want him to hear_ , because that part is pretty obvious.

He also has to muster up the balls to repay her generousness with some of the bravery he’s so fucking famous for.

So he asks the question he’s most scared of the answer to: “Does it get… easier?”

She blinks once, and then she smiles again—just a little, sort of sadly, which isn’t exactly optimistic, but he’s still pretty sure this is the most she’s ever smiled at anyone inside of an hour in approximately a million years.

“Yes and no,” she says.

Fucking figures, really.

“I imagine it might be comparable,” she says, “to the way people react to your automail.  It seems to me that once you’re acquainted with people, and you’re more comfortable with them, it’s not as important to try to keep it concealed.  Occasionally people you care about, who care about _you_ as well, will ask insensitive questions—and it’s hard not to be hurt by it, but it usually doesn’t come from a place of malice; they simply cannot understand what it’s like to experience what they’re seeing.  Over time, though, it affects you less, because you’ve heard most of it before, and you’re used to it, and there’s a kind of security in acclimation and acceptance.  But it’s still a world full of right-handed people, isn’t it?  And whether or not they mean well, whether or not they really just want you to be happy in the way that they understand it—many of them, of course, are more motivated by a desire to slot you into a category they recognize than they are by what _you_ want—you are never going to wake up one morning and be one of them.  Some mornings, that feels fine.  Some mornings, it doesn’t.”

He has to resist a really stupid urge to curl his right hand into a ball and draw it back as far as it’ll go up into his sleeve.  Part of how he deals with _that_ is just—not-thinking about it.  Avidly, intently not-thinking about it.  And he sort of assumes everybody else is doing the same, so the idea that she’s been observing it in a smart, detailed, calculated kind of way is…

Unsettling.  A little bit.

But at least the analogy makes it pretty fucking easy to understand.

He clears his throat and keeps his right hand flat on the tabletop.

“So—what do you _say_?  Like, to keep people off your back, or in a conversation or… whatever.  If people ask.”  Horrifying fucking thought.  “Are people gonna ask?”

“Constantly,” she says.

His heart doesn’t drop so much as slither slowly downward, oozing between the heat-swelled masses of his other organs.

“What the fuck am I supposed to say?” he manages.

“For me, it mostly depends on who’s asking,” she says.  “And how they’re asking, and how many times they’ve asked before.  But it’s not so different from what you’re getting already—what do you say now?”

The clamminess of his own fucking hands has gotten distracting.  His thoughts just sort of… throb.  Wordless, aimless, a softly-seething cluster.  Like a mound of maggots.

“Nothing,” he says, which is both true and enormously stupid.  “I guess,” he adds, which at least makes it sound like he has some leeway on both those fronts.

Hawkeye just sort of half-nods briskly, though.  “You don’t owe them anything,” she says.  “And you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone.”  She straightens the folder sitting on the desk in front of her.  “Anything else?”

This might be his only fucking chance.  Sure—the phone number, whatever, but does she really think he’s going to wake her up at two in the morning on a Saturday night just because he’s feeling like he fell into an existential black hole, and the singularity’s ripping him to shreds?

He prods at the side of the automail hand with one of his sensitive fingertips, just to see how much heat it’s still holding.  The answer is, apparently, a fuckton of a lot.

“So you’ve…” Shit.  “This is probably the questions they ask you, isn’t it?”

“It’s different this way,” she says, with a twist of a smile again.  “Trust me.”

Hard to argue with someone like her saying something like that.  “Yeah.  Okay.  Just—you’ve never felt—any of that shit?”

She shakes her head slightly.  Tiny, damp wisps of hair have slipped out of the clip to dangle in bedraggled little curls around the back of her neck.  “I always assumed it was… well, not a myth, exactly.  I thought people were exaggerating—like it was a game of one-upmanship, in some way, and they were all pretending to be more obsessed with it than the person before.  It really wasn’t until Roy and I ended up sitting down and talking out that sort of thing that I understood the distinction.  I had an inkling that there was something I hadn’t factored in, and that they were drawing on _some_ kind of a source of emotion or an impulse that I couldn’t tap into, but mostly I thought they were inventing the extremity of it as they went along.”

Funny, kind of.  He can see that—it makes _sense_ —but he just…

Jumped to the conclusion, instantly and doubtlessly and without hesitation, that he was the one in the wrong.

“And you’ve never been in love,” he says.

_Whatever the fuck that means._

“No,” she says, softly.  “But I have it on good authority that that really exists as well.”

He chances a glance up at her.  She looks serious, but in that gentle way she gets when it’s just… well, mostly when it’s just him, or just Al, or sometimes just Mustang when he’s not being a total fucking douchewad.

“It might very well exist for you,” she says.  “Regardless of what anyone will tell you—and they will tell you all sorts of things, because everyone wants to be an expert on everyone else’s life—they’re not mutually dependent.  Sex is not _necessarily_ a part of love, just as love is not necessarily a part of sex.  I have that on good authority, too.”

He gets the feeling he knows what’s between the letters of that phrase now.

He wonders who the hell Mustang was so in love with.  Was it her?  Except he looks at her with no resentment—not a fucking whit of regret or frustration or discontent.

And isn’t that what they’re due?  People like him, and her, and… apparently there are others.  Someone’s always going to be demanding more than they’ve got to give.

“Okay,” he says, since he ought to say something.  “I—” The words are woefully fucking insufficient, but maybe she’ll detect the echoes of the crash of the tidal wave behind them.  “Thank you.”

There’s an incredible sort of depth to the smile she gives him that makes him think she hears it loud and fucking clear.

“My pleasure,” she says.  Right as he starts to vacillate about whether he should come up with more shit to say, she starts collecting her clipboard and pushes her chair back.  “Are you ready to go?  Even if he stops to flirt at the switchboard, I think he’ll be waiting for us fairly soon.”

“Sure,” Ed says.  “Yeah.”

It feels like he has to peel his ass off of the seat of the chair, which is about the _least_ pleasant thing he can fucking imagine, but that’s what he gets for wearing all these layers of dumbass wool in the name of… patriotism or whatever.  He’s fucking soaked in his own sweat, and every cell in his body feels heavy with it and fucking parched at the same time.

He slogs after her while she closes up the office and stuff, but even over the ongoing moan of agony about the damn heat, there’s a voice in his head that he can’t silence, and it just gets louder as they start on down the halls.  Eventually he just has to let it speak for him.

“I don’t want you to feel like—” It’d be great if, y’know, it actually knew what it wanted to say, instead of just being insistent as fuck.  “Like you’re—obligated to… stand up for me or something.  I can deal with this, and I _should_ deal with it; I’m not some f—” Damn.  “—some _kid_.”

“I have never mistaken you for ‘some kid’,” she says, looking sideways at him.  “And I dare to hope I’ll never start.”  She pauses.  “But consider it this way—if the situation that is under my purview here in this office is compromising one of my colleagues, it’s my duty to step in.  If it seems that he has a handle on it, I can leave him to his own devices; but the moment it seems like it’s out of anyone’s control, I need to intervene.  Fair?”

If that word means anything, Riza Hawkeye would make a pretty damn good judge.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Fair.”

She smiles again, and he smiles a little bit back, and that’s—

Nice.  That’s nice, is what it is.

Sure enough, the second they step out of the thick, stuffy, weary-fan-cycled air of HQ and out onto the thick, sticky, miserably-sun-infused air on the loop of the motor pool, Mustang pulls up right in front of them.  Ed can’t help wondering what it’s like to be the kind of person whose timing is perfect—or even just whose timing is anything other than shit-fucking-awful all of the goddamn time, no exceptions, no appeals.  Is this thing—the minor serendipity thing, shit working out, little tiny things just timing right—how it’s supposed to work, and Ed just regularly fucks this up, too?  Is this what the universe is supposed to look like, and you’re supposed to greet it with an expectation of reasonable treatment, if not outright fucking _kindness_ , and then the expectation is what results in a reality that makes your existence seem anything other than absolutely fucking futile and a waste…?

Or maybe it’s just the heat addling his swelled-up meat-brain.

That’s more likely.

Hawkeye opens the back door of the car for him, then closes it after him (and he _does_ remember to mumble a thank-you, which Al would be relieved about or whatever), so he figures she’s going to sit shotgun—which is kind of funny—and resigns himself to feeling like a kid relegated to the backseat while the grownups talk or whatever.

Except then she goes around to the driver’s side and stands there, staring Mustang down, until he heaves a huge, overstated, put-upon sigh and gets out of the car.

“Thank you, sir,” she says as she appropriates his seat.

“Insubordination,” he says, and then he opens the back door and slides in next to Ed, and—

Well, shit.

It’s hard for Ed to tell if his mouth is extra-dry, or just normal amounts of dry, and why would that even be happening, anyway?  Wait, he knows why: it’s the fucking embarrassment that Roy fucking Mustang, of all people, has the insider scoop on the deepest, darkest, coldest parts of him, and he has to turn up to work tomorrow _knowing_ that Mustang knows, and…

And yeah, the bastard’s being pretty legitimately cool about it so far, but what if one of these days, Ed does some stupid shit that pushes him over the threshold between dignified-graceful-Mustang and petty-as-fuck-conniving-Mustang, and vengeance is swift and merciless and fucking levels him?

“The least you could do,” Mustang says to Hawkeye, arms folded, which must be too warm, “is _pretend_ that you’re doing it out of respect for my rank.”

“It’s out of respect for your safety, sir,” Hawkeye says calmly as she guides them out onto the street.  Ed doesn’t even feel the bump you usually get when you cross the curb at the end of the driveway.  “And out of a very rational fear for my and Edward’s corporeal lives.”

Mustang’s calculated bored expression shifts slightly into a frown with the corners of his mouth pulled way down, which…

Is he trying not to laugh?

This is just too fucking weird.  Today is too fucked up.  Ed’s going to wake up tomorrow, and all of this will have been a fever dream from the fucking heat.  Al’ll be like, “You were thrashing even more than usual; I moved all of the breakable objects to another room.”  He’ll get in the shower and turn the water on cold until the automail juncture tightens to aching, and the shivering’s too much to bear.

“If I could live without you,” Mustang says, “I’d take drastic disciplinary action.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Hawkeye says.

Mustang sinks back into the carseat, tilting his head back and casting a forlorn sort of look at the ceiling.  “There’s a first time for everything,” he says.

“Yes, sir,” Hawkeye says—in the way that means she’s stifling a laugh.

Ed’s and Al’s place is about two miles from Central HQ if you cut through the park, which is just long enough of a walk that he’d have sweated out half his body weight (including automail) by now if he’d hoofed it on a day like this.  Even having to take the street route, though, they’re getting close.  He knows better than to ask how Hawkeye knows exactly where he lives.

She glances at him in the rearview, then frowns and adjusts it.  Ed kind of wants to make some stupid joke about how Mustang can’t even do that right, but Mustang did a lot of shit for him just now that nobody in the brass would’ve paid him for.  Sure, Mustang sees his men like chess pieces, but he’s the only one who doesn’t sacrifice them just to win and then toss them into the box when he’s done.  Ed’s better at watching people now, and he’s spent a hell of a lot more time in Central in the last few years than he ever did before—Mustang’s the only ranking officer he’s ever seen who didn’t let being smart as a fucking adder turn him into an asshole, too.

Or at least not a _real_ asshole.  Just a surface-level one.  That’s what Hawkeye didn’t quite say— _You’re a softie on the inside, and we all know it, sir._

They pull up in front of the towering off-white complex—which is, incidentally, the only place approximately midway between HQ and the university which lets tenants keep cats—where the Elrics would hang their hats if they had any.  Al might have one.  He’s into that sort of thing, and he still gets cold a lot.

Not today, though, Ed’d bet.

Hawkeye stops the car and half-turns to look at him.  He focuses on her; Mustang’s still too—something.  Mustang’s too _something_.  Too a lot of things, probably.

How come words are so fucking easy for other people?  How can they just open their mouths and release these sentences that have all the right words for all the right feelings?  How do they just _speak_ and have it make sense and get the point across?

Then again, maybe people wonder that about him and alchemy, or him and science, or him and… anything.

Science is just so much easier than this emotion shit.

“Um,” he says, reaching for the door handle.  “I mean—‘thank you’ sounds kind of stupid right now, because it barely gets a start on any of it.”

“You are absolutely welcome,” Hawkeye says.

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Mustang says.

“Yeah,” Ed says, getting one leg out.  “If I don’t die of heatstroke by then.”

“Please don’t,” Mustang says.  “Just think of the paperwork.”

Ed makes a face at him and gets a bona fide shit-eating grin right back.

“Take care, Edward,” Hawkeye says.

“Yeah,” he says.  “You, too.”

He shuts the door and turns around and doesn’t look back as he heads up the inefficiently-windy little walkway leading to the front door of their complex.  Even just that much motion makes the sweat run down the small of his fucking back again, collecting under the waistband of the stupid pants and the stupid cavalry skirt, and would it still be unseemly or something to strip right here where he stands trying to jam his uncooperative fucking key into the stubborn fucking lock?  He can hear the engine idling.  They’re waiting for him to get in, which is—

It’s always… baffled him, a little.  How much people care.  No matter what he does, no matter what he says—no matter how loud and brash and arrogant and obnoxious he proves that he can be; no matter how many times he fucks up or freaks out or totally fails at a normal conversation—so many people insist on _giving_ a shit.

And that fucks with his head, sometimes.  Because he doesn’t deserve it, not really, not after who he’s been and what he’s done, and that makes him feel guilty about it.  On top of which—he owes them something, doesn’t he?  Everyone who’s ever been kind and gotten nothing but his bullshit in return.

He finally gets the stupid door unlocked—after the fucking humiliation of fighting with it for so long sends another little stream of sweat running down his temple, that is.  And it’d be shitty not to wave, even if he just wants this to be over now; even if he just wants to crawl back to his sanctuary and curl up and pick it apart from start to finish and figure out what the hell it all means.

So he turns, and lifts his hand, and sees a pale blur of motion in the window, and then lets himself in and shuts the door behind him.

When he sees that the elevator’s out, he almost punches through the fucking wall.

Of course it is, though.  Something’s got to balance it out.

Funny thing is, Al doesn’t even look surprised when he bangs through their apartment door in just his undershirt and his boots and his boxers, with a wad of damp-ass fucking wool and shit slung over one shoulder.

“Not a word,” he says anyway, for good measure or whatever.

Al blinks at him.  “How about ‘Can I get you some water, Brother?’  That’s seven, though.”

Ed kicks the door shut, drops the whole pile of clothes onto the kitchen floor (and to be fair, it _is_ kind of a gross wet _fwump_ noise, but Al’s expression of horrified disgust is overkill), and goes and opens the icebox to stick his head in.

“This is more efficient,” he says.

“Not for dehydration,” Al says.  “Ed, are you—okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Just packing my shit to move to Briggs if this lasts another week.”

“Well,” Al says, “that’s an idea with some problems of its own, but—I meant… you.  I meant emotionally.”  He swallows, audibly, and Ed forces his body to stay still so he doesn’t react.  “Are you okay?”

If he keeps his face in the icebox, it’ll be easier to lie, but Al’ll know instantly that he’s trying to hide.

Damn.

He draws his head out, closes the door, and turns, rigging up the combination of muscle-pulls that used to make an easy grin.

“’Course I am,” he says.  “You know me.”

Fuck.  Al’s face tightens; his eyebrows dip; this is a long blade of old hurt with one edge honed to anger.

“I do,” he says, and his voice stays colder than the air Ed just stopped savoring.  “And I know your heart’s in the right place—I know it always is, and I know you always do your best to listen to it, and sometimes that’s the problem.  I know you feel like you’re a burden—you always have.  I know you honestly believe that what you see as ‘your’ problems should only ever _be_ yours; I know you think asking for help is imposing, and I know you think that sharing the darker parts of your internality with me would jeopardize the life you bought for me one day and one battle and one drop of blood at a time.”

He shoves his chair back, smacks one hand down on the table, and stands.

“And I know that’s _bullshit_ , Ed,” he says, and the aftershocks of Al _swearing_ are probably going to ripple back and forth through Central City for the rest of time.  “I understand that you’re trying to shelter me from all of the _terrible_ things you think that you are and that you’re capable of and whatever else it is, but that’s not how it works, Brother.  We didn’t fight like that to get this body back so you could put me in a glass case and tiptoe around me for the rest of our lives.  There’s something wrong—I know that.  It’s pretty darned obvious, actually.  There’s been something wrong for a long time, and I keep trying to help you, and you keep putting up walls trying to keep me safe.  But there’s no such _thing_ as safe.  There’s you, and me, and what we feel, and what the world looks like on any given day.  That’s all we get.  And if we can’t be in this together, I don’t—”

He shuts his mouth, and there’s a harsh twist to his lips; he pushes his hair back with his left hand and stares at the ceiling for a long second before he sets his gaze on Ed again, and some of the frantic urgency diffuses away.

“I am not going to give up on you,” Al says.  “I am _never_ going to give up on you, no matter how many times you give up on yourself; no matter how hard you try to make me so that I can ‘move on’ or whatever it is that you think I want, or that you think is best for me, or… any of that.  I’m not.  But I can’t make you let me in, Brother.  That’s something you have to do—for me, and for yourself, and for everybody who cares about you, and you and I both know it’s a longer list than you want to admit, because you’re convinced that you’re unworthy of any kind of love.  Which is also you-know-what.”

He clears his throat.  It used to sound tinny—a little grinding noise; the echo of a memory of a motion.  Now it’s real.  Now it’s real and fleshy and warm.

“You need to realize,” Al says, “that you are _never_ going to get me to leave.  You are never going to get me to quit.  You can slam the door in my face a thousand times, a _million_ times, trying to scare me off, but I’m the only person on this planet stubborner than you, and I’m not going anywhere.  So it’s up to you, Ed.  You can tell me, or I can wear you down.  But you’re not going to send me off on the perfect little life you’ve got planned for me, because I’m _not_ leaving you behind.”

He tries to slap his chair back under the table, misses, whacks his hand against the edge of the tabletop, whimpers “ _Ow_ ,” pushes the chair in carefully, and then swivels on his heel and stalks out of the room.

Ed feels—

Tingly.  Empty.  Drained.

Exhausted, in the sense that he’s been hollowed out, and there’s a little knot of recklessness and fear in the pit of his stomach, tangled up together so tight he can’t extricate one or the other to figure out which one might win.

“Al,” he says.

Pointed silence.  He deserves that.

“Al,” he calls, louder, and his feet move, trailing the half-undone laces of these stupid, heavy boots.  “Hey.”

Al’s in his bedroom, sitting primly on the bed—back straight, arms crossed, making an exaggerated pouting face at the wall.

Little shit.

Ed loves him.

And maybe—maybe sometimes—that’s enough.

He sits down in the clear space that Al deliberately left and toes his boots off.  There’s a hole in the toe of his left sock, which he didn’t notice because he couldn’t feel it.

He folds his hands, knitting his fingers up together.  The steel’s still too fucking warm.  Honestly, _Al’s_ too fucking warm—he’s radiating it.  Sweat prickles on the same place on his hairline that it does on Ed’s.

Ed takes a deep breath of the nasty-ass, too-humid air and lets it out slow.

“Can I talk to you?” he asks.

The pout disappears, and there’s a plaintiveness at the corners of Al’s eyes, and his mouth curves up just a little on one side.

“Please do,” he says.

Well, this is going to be a bitch.

But most things worth doing are.

“Okay,” Ed says.  There’s a little bit of fluff in the joint on his right thumb.  He picks it out.  “I was—I got waylaid by Mustang and Major Hawkeye on my way out, ’cause… Some of the guys were—talking, y’know, and it got sort of— _y’know_ , and—”

“You’re not into that,” Al says—softly, calmly, a statement of fact.  “Any of it.”  His gaze slants sideways to fix on Ed’s face.  “Are you?”

Ed swallows, and swallows again, and looks down at his clenched-up hands.

“Not—really,” he says.  “No.  I dunno.  Major Hawkeye—” She made it sound so _normal_ ; why is this so fucking hard?  “She said there’s—a word for… it.  For—people.  Like her.  And maybe like me.”

“You mean people who are great?” Al asks, and there’s a little glimmer in his eye, and Ed’s throat does a funny sticky thing he hates and loves at the same time.

“Shut up,” he says.  “You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Al says, leaning over to bump his shoulder against Ed’s.  “And I’m listening.”

And maybe—

Maybe just this _once_ —

Things’ll turn out better than he expected.


End file.
